Cybersecurity is central to how a business protects its customers and maintains customer trust, said Globe Telecom senior vice president (SVP) and business head Peter Maquera during The CIFI Security Summit 2018 at Makati Shangri-La Manila on August 30, 2018.
Maquera spoke on “Saving the SOC (Security Operations Center) Challenge” during the conference which brought together leading security experts around the world including the Philippines for discussions on threat intelligence, cybersecurity, and digital investigation.
“The main ROI for us is not even a number,” Maquera said of Globe’s commitment on cybersecurity. “The ROI for us is trust. That’ss fundamentally what we’re investing.”
The telco firm has 65 million consumers on their platform plus 200,000 business establishments and over a million households depending on its products and services.
He shared that according to statistics, the average age of Filipinos is 23.5. By 2025, a bulk of the workforce in the Philippines will be composed of millennials who are the most adaptable to new technology.
Forty-three percent use their personal devices at work while the average number of devices owned by individuals is close to three.
He further revealed that 69% of phishing emails get through the email and 71% of a person’s co-workers can see his password when he enters it. Hackers are also getting more sophisticated, using bona fide admin capabilities embedded in several apps. Meanwhile, a lot of people do not have passwords for their smartphones.
“The more digital we became, the more exposed we would be,” said Maquera. “Part of the problem is there [are] more surfaces to attack from. All of these are creating quite a profitable cybercrime economy.”
To address cybercrime in the organization, the Globe executive suggested that cybersecurity issues should be discussed at the boardroom level. ?It’s got to be part of your onboarding. It’s got to be part of your training. And I think it has to be propagated across the whole company,” he stressed.
JG Summit Holdings chief information officer Carlos Santos agreed, saying that cybercrime risks and the importance of cybersecurity should be communicated from the top to the bottom of the corporate structure.
“As long as there’s technology, there is always room for cybercriminals to develop more sophisticated tools to attack us,” said Atty. Angela Marie de Gracia of the Department of Justice’s cybercrime division. She added that it is up to us how we share our information and secure our digital devices for data privacy and protection.
Santos and de Gracia were panelists at a discussion on the effects of cybercrime threats on individuals, organizations, and industries.
For their part, Maquera revealed that Globe is cutting down on entry points and devices, mindful of who are bringing their own gadgets to the workplace. The company is also automating, applying artificial intelligence (AI) and more technologies to address cybercrime.
AI and machine learning were also mentioned by Christopher Paz and Francis Senora of the National Bureau of Investigation as some of the tools they are using against cybercrime in the Philippines. Paz and Senora also took part in the panel discussion.
